Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, Intel Ups The Ante

Beyond just this launch, Intel is readying a full family of Solid State Storage products that they'll be bringing to market not only for the mainstream and enthusiast or performance-minded consumer, but also a series of enterprise-class products as well.

While this slide from Intel does have a whiff of traditional marketing rhetoric, there is also a lot of truth to the fact that the hard drive has been the slowest component of any computing architecture and it still is today.  Hence, Intel is claiming that this is an obvious place that the company should claim as new turf on which to establish a leadership position.  The premise being that, if semiconductor technology can ramp up compute performance exponentially, that same technology will enable storage subsystems a similar performance growth curve.

Also, Intel is tipping their hand today with respect to future SSD products.  As we can see here, Intel's SLC-based (Single-Level Cell) drives will be branded as their "Extreme" performance product offerings.  Specifically, the X25-E series of SLC-based drives will offer the same 250MB/sec Sustained Read performance as the X25-M product but Sustained Write performance, which is definitely the most significant bottleneck with any SSD, will be ramped to 170MB/sec, which equates over 2X the available bandwidth.  We're definitely execited to take a look at the X25-E product when it hits the market in Q4 this year.